Law Commons^™

Framing Disability, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Mainstream attitudes toward disability lag behind U.S. law. This tension between attitudes and law reflects a wider gap between the ideas about disability pervasive in mainstream society — what this Article calls the "outside" view — and the ideas about disability common within the disability community — what this Article calls the "inside" view. The outside perspective tends to misunderstand and mischaracterize aspects of the experience, theory, and law of disability.

The law can help to close this gap in attitudes by changing the conditions in which attitudes are formed or reinforced. Thus, this Article proposes using framing rules to …